A lot of these loose teams of people from outside the organization already exist today, they are just not formally recognized. In the future, virtual teams of independent workers will be commonplace and be able to be pulled together in a moment's notice through the formal social networks that already exist today like Linkedin. Piecework will again be popular and unfortunately, most of us will not have the security of a regular paycheck. But then again, who really has that today?

Couple of good observations on communication, organization and design trends but need sanity check.
The highest percentage of business is smaller than 100 employees.
In these communities/spheres there is need for product continuity (evolution, not revolution) to remain in business, so profit is king and main driver on what work practices are really effective to help in product/service delivery.
As much as I would like to agree with most of those 10 key ideas, I give more value to MLED, feory and Pubs for the critical thinking on these mostly philosophical projections.

Corporate culture plays a major role, I believe, in "how we will work"!A company's leadership, the management team's ability to blend effective team structures, focused product and service delivery along with achieving measurable positive results will determine "how they will work", and those corporate entities who can apply the techniques for a balanced work-life will establish a workforce who's corporate culture is defined by " how they are working" in order to sustain consistent business and revenue growth.

It's too often true that what technology (especially on the order of productivity tools running on windoze) gives you with one hand, it takes away with the other. Just because the technology is developed (even adopted) more and more quickly doesn't mean its maturation is necessarily or commensurately accelerated. Does all this technology make us more productive? In some very meaningful ways, yes, and in other ways, no.
Determining the yes and no takes time. That's a large part of the process whereby most of the questionable concepts behind all the jargon are weeded out, and how the viable, workable parts, if any, become accepted and legitimate.

Hi I am jena
The article is good but simultaneously confusing. What I found that the rapid growth of IT and other technology has provided the material need and we falsely believing that technology helping us but rather increasing our greed and we are falling self created trap and trying to use jargons for justification. My question is whether we are consume more what is our share in universe.

There is generally a piece of wisdom in each side of any argument. In this case they are:
1)Automation and information technology will continue to reduce the need for the human side of "routine" processing, so those who wish to add value in the future are advised to be prepared to problem solve a larger percentage of their time.
2)A higher propotion of on-routine work is no excuse for dysfunctional collaboration. Clear problem definition, leadership, ownership and appropriate division of labor should never disappear as core competencies, and can exist amongst a group of individuals who do not work together every day.

Could you find some more buzzwords to describe the organizational breakdown of many modern corporations and try to portray their distress in glowing futuristic terms?
This is the kind of intellectual fluff that clueless business leaders worldwide tend to fill their heads with when running an organization correctly is beyond their grasp. "You can throw together a team of people without regard to their locations or prior working relationships and have them be effective." "You can expect your workers to be available at all hours of the day and night and give their own personal time at a moment's notice." "It's not necessary to plan ahead to have the proper talent-you can just find someone somewhere."
Here's a prediction for the future of those organizations that think ANY of this is a good idea: You'll have more employee turnover, especially among your most talented and disciplined employees.

Thank you for your article Tom Austin. I agree with one writer that wrote: “I recognize every item on the list. In traditional workplaces it goes by the name of "lack of planning", "fire-fighting", "agendas", "turf battles", and to me the most indicative of choas--"we need a tiger team". But many of these items are recognized within large companies today. For many small engineering shops that I come in contact with, their employees have an excellent team relationship and good communication with their clients. But I understand your point. I do recommend that you revisit your predication list before the Big Ball drop in Time Square for 2011…just in case you come up with something new.

Feory, Pubs, and especially MLED, thank you for injecting some common sense into this thread. I side with the skeptics here. This is exactly the kind of buzzword-overload nonsense that has made Scott Adams fabulously wealthy.
I've read stuff like this before, foisted upon workers (at all levels) by executives in an attmpt to veil what they really want to say: "work harder. Embrace change just because. Sixty-five percent of you are going to lose your jobs next week when we downsize."
The author also appears to be saying that all accountability and organizational structure, even small, useful amounts, having been proven completely obsolete, will go the way of the dinosaur, and that work and worker interaction is going to get increasingly undisciplined. Tell that to those working on high-rel, mil-spec, or any type of product or process on which lives depend.
Show me work happening "24 hours a day, seven days a week", and "lines between personal, professional...and family matters" disappearing, and I'll show you unduly overworked, insane workers, their incompetent, unsuccessful, desperate managers, and their broken families. Predicting an unsustainable trend without any hint as to how or why it ought to become steady-state robs this article of most of its credibility. I want my five minutes back.
I'll make my own prediction: smart successful companies, along with the smart executives and managers who lead them, will continue to explore new ideas and methods to evolve the technology that is a corporation. They may flow with the current in matters of style, but they'll stand like a rock in matters of principle. They'll know the difference. They'll recognize that there is some truth in these ten predictions, but that most of this won't last any longer than a celebrity marriage.

So true Pubs. But I think "tiger team" is so '90s -- today its equivalent is called a "Kaizen event." Same idea though -- swarm a bunch of people for one week and see if they can collectively figure out why the wheels fell off the cart, and how to not let that happen next time.
It's amazing how many people make careers out of this stuff!